Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art Part 2

"The tones of M. Paul Gauguin's pictures are very little separated from each other; because of this, there is in his work a dull harmony. Dense trees rise from the fertile soil, abundant and humid, invade the frame, pursue the sky. The air is heavy. Bricks seen between the trunks indicate a nearby house; things are lying about, muzzles are scattered in the thicket--cows. These reds of roofs and of cattle the artist constantly opposes to his greens and reflects them again in the waters, enc.u.mbered with long gra.s.ses, which run between the tree-trunks."

This shows clearly that Gauguin was treating landscape at this period already as a synthesis, a decorative whole and not, like Manet, p.i.s.sarro or the Divisionists, as an exercise in the a.n.a.lysis of atmospheric vibration. As for the relief on wood, Feneon writes:

"On the pear-tree wood, which we regret to see left in monochrome, a naked woman stands out in half relief, her hand to her hair, seated rectangularly in a landscape. This is the only number of sculpture.

Nothing in painted wood, in gla.s.s-paste, in wax."

Paris with her art-theories had nothing now to teach Gauguin. He must find his own way, create his own tradition. Aloof alike from the theories of the Impressionists and from those of their successors, the Pointillists--theories of the disa.s.sociation of tones and of the a.n.a.lytic disintegration of light, based on the scientific treatises of Chevreuil and Helmholtz--he was painfully tending back to the old decorative tradition that a picture must be an unit, the harmonious expression of a single emotion. Hunger proved again the best friend of the independent artist. He fled from Paris and sought refuge in the country.

II

The place of refuge which Gauguin found was the village of Pont-Aven in the district of Finistere in Brittany.

There is no doubt that this chosen spot and its surroundings had upon his art an influence only secondary to that exercised later by Tahiti.

Indeed the charm of Tahiti itself was slow to efface this influence.

The Celtic fringe of Europe--Cornwall, the Highlands of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia--presents everywhere a great similarity in natural feature and in the character of its inhabitants.

The Celt is an outcast. Driven backward by successive waves of civilization and conquest, he has finally occupied those lands which were so unprofitable to his conquerors that he was able to remain in them undisturbed. Long residence in these desolate places has made of him a natural mystic, a conservative. Perhaps he might never have been anything else had not the nineteenth century--with its railroads and the life-weariness of its cultivated cla.s.ses--made of him a curiosity. The hordes of tourists, of bad artists, of dealers in journalese, who rave about Brittany, Cornwall, or Ireland as picturesque summer-resorts, show that civilization has obtained its revenge on the savage who prefers to remain a savage.

Paul Gauguin did not a.s.suredly go to Brittany to discover the picturesque. Had he done so his painting would have ranked no higher than the painting of Charles Cottet or of Lucien Simon. His real home as an artist, as he was later to discover, lay elsewhere--under less troubled skies, in the midst of more tropical vegetation. But the gloom, the melancholy inertia, the mystic faith, the simplicity of this land of wind-mills, small trees, granite coasts and menhirs, worked strongly on the yet untamed primitive in him. Stronger still perhaps was the appeal of the sea, the most restless and yet the most changeless element in nature. Gauguin was in appearance, as in manners, a sailor--the eye, the direct curt speech, the reserved disdain, the freedom of manners, all these in him had been accentuated by his early experiences. In Brittany he found the sea; he found an unspoiled people; he found, above all, repose from the everlasting chatter of art-theories that, like the bubbling of endless bottles of too light champagne, frothed eternally in the cafes of Paris. Brittany gave him greater faith in himself; Brittany began to dispel the nineteenth century skepticism that was slowly stifling him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Struggle of Jacob with the Angel.]

His first stay in Pont-Aven was destined to be short. It is chiefly remarkable for the fact that here he was visited by Emile Bernard, then only about seventeen years of age, whose relations with Gauguin and other painters afford matter for so much controversy that they must be examined in detail.

Bernard was the type of infant phenomenon that springs up, mushroom-like, in an overheated atmosphere of artistic and literary controversy. At the age of sixteen he was writing violently naturalistic and extremely bad poetry. He next went in for painting, raced off to Brittany to see Gauguin, was received with coolness, ran back to Paris.

Here he found Van Gogh fresh from Holland and, when Van Gogh in turn went to Arles, became his most industrious correspondent. Later he heard that the crazy old hermit, Paul Cezanne, was living at Aix--so off to Aix went Bernard. More letters were the outcome of the visit.

Meanwhile he progressed in painting from a divisionist and neo-impressionist technique to a facile imitation of Gauguin's Breton style, then to a combination of Cezanne and Gauguin, to conclude with painting of Oriental subjects in a style not so very far removed from that of Gerome. He imitated everyone in turn, only to end by becoming that drab eclectic thing--what the French call a "pompier" or we an "Academician." Thus he justified Gauguin's sardonic prophecy that "Bernard would end up something like Benjamin Constant!"

We owe Bernard a debt in that he has preserved for us the beautiful letters which Van Gogh wrote to him, and--more precious debt--that he has given us those rare talks and letters in which that old stoic Cezanne revealed a glimpse of his agony. But we owe Bernard nothing in that he has seen fit to defame the art and character of the man whose style he was the first to copy--Paul Gauguin. But of this more later.

III

The winter of 1886 found Gauguin again in Paris. Here he met another artist whose life was destined to have upon his an influence quite different from that of Emile Bernard.

This was Vincent Van Gogh, newly arrived from Holland. Gauguin has left on record in a piece of prose called _Les Crevettes Roses_ his first impression of Van Gogh, which proves beyond dispute that Gauguin loved Van Gogh and admired him, despite his habitual reserve and the haughty disdain with which he was already looking upon all things European.

At this time Gauguin was still painfully seeking, still patiently and laboriously struggling towards his own self-realization. Van Gogh, although five years younger, had fully realized himself in essence--was, in fact, realized from the beginning. The difference between them was that Van Gogh was an humble Dutch peasant, with the mystic blend of religion and animality which is common to Flemish and Dutch artists (for example, Breughel, Rubens or Verhaeren), while Gauguin was a Spaniard, hard and aristocratic, but corrupted by cosmopolitan influences and the strain of French blood.

For Van Gogh the future only held the liberating spiritual wors.h.i.+p of the sun, which was to raise his art to its highest pitch of lyric ecstacy and to destroy the brain that had created it. For Gauguin the future held a long and stoic struggle with the ironic destiny that left him half-an-European to the end, his work only a broken fragment of what he had dreamed.

It is a pity, in a way, that these men ever met. But their meeting and the drama which was played out later between them, had in it the inevitable quality of Greek tragedy. For the moment their meeting was without result, except that perhaps it woke Gauguin to a realization that to be a great artist one must love life as well as love art. In short, one must be religious. But where was Gauguin to find his religion?

Certainly not in Paris, the capital of intellectual skepticism. Nor, for the moment, in sleepy and mournful Brittany. The memories of his early initiation into the splendors of the tropics awoke in him and he undertook, in 1887, a voyage to the Martinique in company with a young painter, Charles Laval.

There is no doubt that this journey completely revealed to Gauguin his own primitivism, although it left him for the time an invalid, threatened with dysentery, suffering from constant intestinal pains, and although it brought Laval to the brink of the grave.

If the reader wishes to know something of what Martinique was at this time, he should turn to Lafcadio Hearn's "Two Years in the French West Indies." Hearn, like Gauguin, was a disillusionized cosmopolite, disgusted with the ba.n.a.l artifice, the blatant commercialism, the pedantic and Puritanic hypocrisy of our Occidental civilization. Like Gauguin, Hearn found in the West Indies a revelation of a world which had not lost touch with Nature--a world of men who were content to remain, in Nature's eyes, something as ephemeral and as harmonious as the trees, the flowers, the beasts among which they lived. Like Gauguin again, Hearn was nearly destroyed by this vision, but yet kept faith with it to the last.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Idol.]

In the pictures which Gauguin produced during his stay in Martinique, we find the first rude indications of his later manner--the manner of a mystic poet who sees all life, the life of man, of vegetation, of the earth and the sea, as being parallel, harmonious manifestations of the same Divine presence and therefore essentially in unity with each other.

If Gauguin did not realize himself in Martinique, he at least found himself on the road to realization. But the unchecked power of the sun, steadily sapping not only the white race, but also the race of mixed blood, with which he, like Hearn, felt so much sympathy, banished him from this Eden at the same time as it gave him a hint for the future.

His health demanded a return to France. He came back, bringing with him pictures--experimental, tentative efforts to reconcile the glow and gloom of the tropics with p.i.s.sarro's a.n.a.lysis of paler northern sunlight. He brought back also the germ of thousands of other pictures which he, as yet, could not paint. He brought back with him an idea.

IV

After seeing the Antilles and returning to Paris, Gauguin was again brought face to face with the problem against which he had already struggled--the problem of his poverty.

He had obtained at Martinique the vision of a new world of art, which he knew he was some day destined to realize. But for the present he had neither lodging and studio, nor resources of any kind. He was forced to live on charity.

Charity came to him in the shape of Emile Schuffenecker, who had also given up finance for a career as artist.

Schuffenecker was not a genius, but he knew ability when he saw it, and opened his doors freely to this needy colleague. It is a pity that Gauguin repaid this generous hospitality of a friend by insulting Schuffenecker as an artist.

Gauguin's relations with his friends are amongst the most painful episodes of his life. One is almost inclined to think with Emile Bernard that "the basis of Gauguin's character was a deep-seated egoism," or, with Meier-Graefe, that Gauguin was nothing but a great child. Neither of these views is, however, wholly correct.

Gauguin was the son, be it remembered, of a radical journalist and the grandson of a Socialist pamphleteer. Journalism in France is not the same thing as in England. There is scarcely any polite journalism in France. Gauguin himself was always talking, according to Bernard, of art and life needing "the blow of the fist." Paul Deroulede, Edmond Drumont, Henri Rochefort, Octave Mirbeau, Zola, Clemenceau, and other celebrated journalists of the Dreyfus period (the heyday of French journalism) knew quite well what this "blow of the fist" meant, and practiced it upon every opportunity.

Moreover, Gauguin was nearly forty, had knocked about the world a great deal, banging himself against many sharp corners in the process, and was face to face with want. It is also possible that he felt bound, for the sake of his wife and children, to make as much money as possible.

Finally, he believed in himself as an artist, if no one else did. The world had well hammered into him the hard lesson that one must either hold a high opinion of oneself or become an object of contempt. As he put it himself, "Is it necessary to be modest, or, in other words, an imbecile?"

So he accepted the use of Schuffenecker's studio, sold as many of his own pictures as he could, and sneered loudly at Schuffenecker's attempt to paint. Later on we find him accepting similarly Van Gogh's hospitality, irritating Van Gogh to the pitch of madness, and--after Van Gogh's death--sending to Bernard and seeking to oppose the proposed exhibition of Van Gogh's pictures on the ground that Van Gogh was only a madman. And later still, when Van Gogh's reputation began to rise in public esteem, Gauguin declared that Van Gogh had learned from him and had called him master.

Such traits are deplorable, if we consider Gauguin as an ordinary man.

But if we treat genius as ordinary humanity and insist upon it conforming in every particular to ordinary standards, it is quite certain that we will never have any genius worthy of the name. Gauguin sinned in good company, with Michaelangelo who thought Raphael had plotted against him, and with Berlioz who has left on record his opinion of Wagner's music. To understand Gauguin one must share to some extent the opinion of Flaubert--which, incidentally, Browning almost endorses--that the man is nothing, the work is all.

It is not easy to read between the lines of Gauguin's self-imposed reserve and self-determined resolve to shock the bourgeoisie. If we attempt to do so, we find a man so set upon his own path that he was almost without friends. Van Gogh he loved without understanding. Daniel de Monfreid he perhaps loved and understood. The shadowy figure of Tehura, a figure perhaps idealized, was to be the only woman who greatly moved him.

Puvis de Chavannes, an artist to whom Gauguin owed much, similarly held himself aloof from all. So did Degas and Ingres, two other artists of Gauguin's stamp. So in ancient Greece did Sophocles.

The truly strong spirits of this world are not those who exist solely on the surface of things. One can only sympathize with them, share their imaginings through long and patient study. Gauguin was not altogether strong; on some sides he was weak, as he himself admitted. But his work increased in vitality and in strength as his aim became more clear.

Schuffenecker's studio was useful to him; he stayed in Paris just long enough to sell as many pictures as he could and to copy Manet's _Olympia_, a picture he greatly admired. Then once more he took the road to Brittany.

V

Despite the fact that Gauguin had, before leaving Paris, held his first one-man show and had actually sold a few pictures, his general situation was not improved. He was now heavily in debt, and his health, undermined at Martinique, remained bad.

He was at an age at which most men find themselves obliged to take stock of the past and to calculate their chances for the future. In Gauguin's case the chances were very small. He was crushed by his own impotence to realize the art he had dreamed.

It was at this juncture that Vincent Van Gogh, now at Aries, came forward and offered him a lodging, despite the fact that he himself could not sell his own pictures and was entirely dependent on the self-sacrificing efforts of his brother Theodore.

For a time Gauguin did not respond to Van Gogh's generous offer to share their fortunes in common. But he sent his own portrait to Vincent, a gloomy, powerful piece of painting which, in the opinion of some, so startlingly resembles Robert Louis Stevenson--like Gauguin a wanderer, but with what a difference! To Vincent this portrait suggested a prisoner, with its yellow flesh and deep blue shadows. He was more than ever determined to draw Gauguin out of the slough of despond into which he was falling, and to work together with him for the better establishment of both their reputations.